Sandy has kindly revisited the numbers and has made the following observations:

I sincerely apologize that in my rush my numbers were imprecise. I went through the study and tallied the exact numbers of each age group, gender and death rates. The numbers are still incredibly painful. I went to a bariatric surgical conference this past Saturday and was given the latest 2005 stats published by the American Society of Bariatric Surgeons, which now estimates 173,000 surgeries performed for 2005.

Anyway, about 8,304 innocent people lost their lives in 2005 due to bariatric surgeries. (Of course it's more considering most die slow deaths from years of nutritional deficits and complications, but we'll disregard those for this exercise.)

According to CNN, there have been 2211 casualties in Iraq as of January 15, 2006 (covering nearly 3 years).

The comparisons still stand in shuttering accuracy: Bariatiric surgeries killed two to five times more Americans in one year than the entire 3-year Iraq War. In fact, more than the Iraq War, Persian Gulf War, Afghan War, Spanish American War, and War of 1812 combined!

In just one year, bariatric atrocities resulted in eleven times more innocent American lives lost than from the Iraq War.

While I place equal tragedy to men and women's lives, of those estimated 8304 deaths, 6294 were women -- our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters -- and 2010 were men -- our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. All were senseless.

This is only a nonissue for people who don't value the lives of people they are prejudiced against. Pure and simple.